The 10-hour marathon speech by Rand Paul, the freshman Kentucky Republican senator, may not technically be considered a filibuster, but it served an important purpose, nonetheless, as the upper chamber seeks to close out its business before going into a week-long Memorial Day recess.

The Senate was in the midst of a debate over the proposed Trade Promotion Authority on Wednesday when, at 1:18 PM, Paul rose from his desk and began speaking against the Patriot Act, executive overreach, and the National Security Agency.

This was Paul’s second filibuster, loosely speaking, since he took office. In February 2013, the Kentucky Republican, for nearly 13 hours, filibustered the nomination of John Brennan to serve as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency over the Obama administration’s use of drones to target American citizens.

“There comes to a time in the history of nations when fear and complacency allow power to accumulate and liberty and privacy to suffer. That time is now,” Paul declared on Wednesday. “And I will not let the Patriot Act, the most un-patriotic of acts, go unchallenged.”

Paul was joined by 10 of his colleagues, including Republican Senators Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and Senator Ron Wyden and Joe Manchin, both of whom are Democrats.

Whether Paul’s latest marathon can be considered a filibuster is irrelevant. There was a method to his madness. Some, such as Reason’s Scott Shackford, have speculated that Paul and Wyden, both vigorous opponents of the Patriot Act, hope to include amendments to make the USA Freedom Act, which has already passed the House of Representatives, a stronger bill.

Paul did state that he plans to propose amendments to the bill, which is backed by Cruz and Lee, to ensure that the privacy of Americans is protected. But Wednesday’s speech may have served another purpose.

Section 215 of the Patriot Act is set to expire at the end of May, the Senate may not have enough time on the clock to pass what is expected to be a very close vote for reauthorization. Rather than the nearly six year extension of the Patriot Act that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the senior senator from Kentucky, may be forced to settle for a short-term reauthorization to avoid sunset of the controversial provision. Paul, who opposes the USA Freedom Act without stronger provisions, would prefer to run out the clock on the provision, letting it expire.

The situation is fluid because McConnell has floated keeping the Senate in session through the Memorial Day weekend to strong-arm reauthorization, but most observers have speculated that there are not the votes to bypass a filibuster, with many members of both parties expressing a desire for reform.

Whether Section 215 survives is fluid at the moment, but Paul’s speech has already had a huge impact. The Department of Justice issued a statement on the status of the NSA’s illegal surveillance program.

“After May 22, 2015,” the release said as reported by the Associated Press, “the National Security Agency will need to begin taking steps to wind down the bulk telephone metadata program in anticipation of a possible sunset in order to ensure that it does not engage in any unauthorized collection or use of the metadata.”

It may be too early to declare victory, but it’s certainly within reach.

Supporters of the NSA’s domestic spying programs say that a vast data collection effort is needed more than ever to prevent terrorist attacks in the United States, but they are unable to point to any specific example of foiled terrorist plots through these unconstitutional, privacy-violating programs.

In June 2013, Gen. Keith Alexander, then the Director of the NSA, claimed that the spying programs prevented “potential terrorist events over 50 times since 9/11.” Testifying before a Senate committee in October of the same year, Alexander backtracked after Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) grilled him for misleading the American public.

“There is no evidence that [bulk] phone records collection helped to thwart dozens or even several terrorist plots,” said Leahy. “These weren’t all plots and they weren’t all foiled. Would you agree with that, yes or no?” he asked the NSA chief.

Alexander, realizing he had been put on the spot for peddling misinformation, simply replied, “Yes.”

Of course Alexander was more honest than his colleague, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who lied about the NSA domestic surveillance program in a March 2013 Senate hearing. He was accused of perjury, although the allegation went nowhere in a Congress filled with pro-surveillance members.

The attack on Sunday evening in Garland, Texas at the “Draw Muhammad” event hosted by an anti-Islam organization will undoubtedly be used as a reason to reauthorize a soon-to-expire provision, Section 215, of the USA PATRIOT Act by which the federal government claims the vast authority to spy on Americans.

But such claims should be met with a large dose of skepticism. One of the suspects involved in the attack had already come across the FBI’s radar. The United States’ top law enforcement agency began investigating him in 2006 on the suspicion that he wanted to join a terrorist group in Somalia.

The alleged attackers in Garland are precisely are the needle for which the federal government claims that it needs the haystack, and intelligence and law enforcement officials failed to prevent what could have been a mass murder.

The NSA’s resources are spread too thin. Collecting the phone calls of virtually every American – the proverbial “haystack” – even if the people on the call are not suspected of any terrorist involvement, not only betrays the constitutionally protected rights defined by the Fourth Amendment, but also makes Americans less safe because intelligence agencies may not be able to connect the dots efficiently and effectively.

Rather than using the Garland attack as tool to further reauthorization of Section 215, which expires on June 1, lawmakers should seriously reexamine the approach to intelligence, requiring agencies like the NSA to focus on actual terrorism suspects as opposed to innocent Americans calling their families and friends.

QUESTION: How do libertarians feel about this Ayn Rand statement: “[The Native Americans] didn’t have any rights to the land and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using… [W]hat was it that they were fighting for, if they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence. Their right to keep part of the earth untouched, unused, and not even as property, but just keep everybody out, so that you can live practically like an animal, or maybe a few caves above it…. Any white person who could bring the element of civilization had the right to take over this country.”

MY SHORT ANSWER: I’ve never seen this comment before; thanks for sharing! Most libertarians — myself included — would disagree with it.

Native Americans did conceive of, and recognize, property rights for scarce resources, such as fishing rights in rivers, which were generally held and passed down in families. Land property wasn’t usually scarce; property rights usually aren’t well-defined when a resource is abundant, since there is no competition for it. Consequently, Native Americans often did not establish land boundaries, homestead particular parcels, or recognize land claims. Some exceptions included an individual or family’s farmed fields and tribal hunting grounds.

Although by European standards, the Native American existence might be considered primitive, the land wasn’t untouched or unused. Native Americans used the land primarily to hunt, to fish, and to farm, but used sustainable practices to insure future sources of food. Natives living in our rainforests today are in a similar position as Native Americans were; libertarians often donate to a legal fund so that they can litigate for recognition of their homesteading claims.

LEARN MORE: Suggestions for further reading on this topic, from Liberator Online editor James W. Harris:

EXCERPT: “I consider myself an Objectivist; I think Ayn Rand’s philosophical and political arguments are basically correct, and I enjoy her literature tremendously. But I think it’s important for Objectivists to acknowledge when Rand was wrong about something, and there can be no doubt she was wrong [in this quote]… The Cherokee had property rights, as well as a written constitution, newspapers, a formal government, schools, and a capital city. Other tribes had similar institutions… I think it’s safe to say that Ayn Rand knew virtually nothing about the history of American Indians. In part this is no fault of hers, since historiography and cultural anthropology at that time was pretty shabby, and because that was a period when the silly leftist romanticization of Indians was first reaching a height which is only now diminishing.”

* “Dances With Myths“ by Terry L. Anderson, Reason Magazine, February 1997. Anderson is executive director of the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) and a leading free market environmentalist. In this article he gives numerous examples of how, at times, American Indians established and defended property rights.

EXCERPT: “American Indian tribes produced and sustained abundant wealth because they had clear property rights to land, fishing and hunting territories, and personal property. Pre-Columbian Indian history is replete with examples of property rights conditioning humans’ relations with the natural environment.”

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